Hacker News: albumen

New comment by albumen in "Joby kicks off NYC electric air taxi demos with historic JFK flight"

albumen — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 06:04:18 +0000

Other countries with good systems also have such people. America’s crime rate is far lower than the 1990s; the impression that you live in a crime-infested world is likely increased media coverage.

I think the real reason the US has poor public transit is that its transport landscape has been shaped by years of planning and funding decisions that have put the car first, and cities rebuilt accordingly. America’s enormity also makes nationwide PT more difficult (but not impossible).

Then add the meritocratic attitude that if you can’t afford a car it’s somehow your fault, and you end up with little political and societal interest in a good public transit system.

*https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates

New comment by albumen in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

albumen — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:13:17 +0000

But the above criteria are mostly subjective, so objectivity largely doesn’t apply.

New comment by albumen in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

albumen — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:16:11 +0000

No, the plasma forms a teardrop shape around small craft like Orion, completely cutting off radio comms. Larger craft like starship or the shuttle which have a roughly cylindrical shape (vs Orion’s circular cross section) aren’t fully enclosed by the plasma. The shuttle had a transmitter attached to its tail for later flights, which could send back telemetry during re-entry.

New comment by albumen in "The best tools for sending an email if you go silent"

albumen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:57:22 +0000

This feels like an AI-generated list of products with no actual hands-on time to let me get a feel if any of the services actually work vs their feature list. Revising the language/structure to not reek of AI would make me think more care had gone into it, and thus be more trustworthy.

New comment by albumen in "Understanding young news audiences at a time of rapid change"

albumen — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:29:32 +0000

I agree that attenborough’s documentaries are carefully composed, presumably to be suitable for a British family audience of the 1970s. You seem to uncharitably ascribe intentional malice to this approach rather than it being a product of its time and cultural values. For what it’s worth, I think his documentaries have done much more good (in raising awareness of the natural world and the need to conserve it) rather than harm.

But what I don’t understand is that you quote the OP article re climate change and racism, but then go off on a tangent re Attenborough? Sounds like you have an axe to grind.

New comment by albumen in "Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)"

albumen — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:05:17 +0000

Blackout curtains.

New comment by albumen in "Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous 'Stop Cop City' Protester"

albumen — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:35:18 +0000

More informed by that comment, really? Did you read this[0]? As someone disinterested in the topic, the controversy seems very overblown and a knee jerk response. His position seems to have been pretty consistent over time.

[0]: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr...

Altman admits OpenAI can't control Pentagon's use of AI

albumen — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:44:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/sam-altman-openai-pentagon

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47255601

Points: 11

# Comments: 0

New comment by albumen in "Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs"

albumen — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:02:44 +0000

Your framing is interesting. You may feel that you can’t change who you are in real life, but people have a choice on how they behave online (or choose not to engage at all). So you could choose to be nice (or at least not a jerk); I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t get people writing to your employer complaining. I’d argue that if you know you’re sometimes a jerk, it’d be less stressful for you and others if you didn’t bring that energy online.

New comment by albumen in "How the V&A acquired YouTube's first ever upload for its collection"

albumen — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:02:16 +0000

The V&A has not just acquired the video, but reconstructed a version of the page, as it would have looked in 2006...The V&A said the video is now considered “a foundational moment in the rise of user-generated content”.

It said the reconstructed page marks an early example of User Interface design conventions, such as badges, rating buttons, sharing and recommendation features – features which continue to shape the internet today.

Previous digital acquisitions include apps such as WeChat, Flappy Bird, EUKI, and the design for the mosquito emoji.

How the V&A acquired YouTube's first ever upload for its collection

albumen — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:02:16 +0000

Article URL: https://museumsandheritage.com/advisor/posts/how-the-va-acquired-youtubes-first-ever-upload-for-its-collection/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47080184

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by albumen in "Show HN: Formally verified FPGA watchdog for AM broadcast in unmanned tunnels"

albumen — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:46:58 +0000

Fascinating. Any references? A cursory web search reveals nothing.

New comment by albumen in "14-year-old Miles Wu folded origami pattern that holds 10k times its own weight"

albumen — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:45:47 +0000

You could look at this in at least two different ways. 1) journalism, and how it’s a better story if the kid is a self-contained genius; or 2) having youth be thankful for mentoring, and to understand little in life is achieved without others’ assistance.

I don’t consider that the parent comment is seeking to “steal the spotlight”; just that it’d be a more realistic appraisal of how success is achieved.

New comment by albumen in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

albumen — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:15:11 +0000

So, your credit card is in practice a debit card?

New comment by albumen in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

albumen — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 23:57:24 +0000

Two options, not two choices. (Unless you have a proportional representation voting system like ireland, in which case you can vote for as many candidates as you like in descending order of preference)

Anyway, there’s a third option: spoil your vote. In the recent Irish presidential election, 13% of those polled afterwards said they spoiled their votes, due to a poor selection of candidates from which to choose.

https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1101/15415...

New comment by albumen in "Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk"

albumen — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:00:39 +0000

I've been driving in Ireland for 30 years and I've never heard anyone number lanes. For me it's left/slow; middle; or right/fast lane.

New comment by albumen in "Qwen-Image-2.0: Professional infographics, exquisite photorealism"

albumen — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:26:41 +0000

Every photoreal image on the demo page has depth of field, it’s just subtle.

New comment by albumen in "GB Renewables Map"

albumen — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:18:36 +0000

Lovely site. As a wind energy ignoramus, it would be great to add descriptions to your FAQ for the red lines, and curtailment.

New comment by albumen in "Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant"

albumen — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:03:06 +0000

They view the framing of the MIT paper not just as bad science, but as a dangerous social tool that uses brain data to "consign people" to being less worthy or "stupid" for using cognitive aids. It flags the paper's alarmist findings as "pseudoscience" designed to provoke fear rather than provide rigorous insight. They highlight several "red flags" in the study's design: lack of a coherent scientific framework, methodological errors like typos, and reliance on invented, undefined terms such as "cognitive debt". They challenge the interpretation of EEG results, explaining that while the paper frames a 55% reduction in connectivity as evidence that a user's "brain sucks," such data could instead indicate increased neural efficiency, an alternative explanation the authors ignore. (EEG measures broad, noisy signals from outside the skull and is better understood as a rough index of brain state than as a precise window into specific thoughts or “intelligence.”)

The hosts condemn the study’s "bafflingly weak" logic and ableist rhetoric, and advise skepticism toward "science communicators" who might profit from selling hardware or supplements related to their findings: one of the paper's lead authors, Nataliya Kosmyna, is associated with the MIT Media Lab and the development of AttentivU, a pair of glasses designed to monitor brain activity and engagement. By framing LLM use as creating a "cognitive debt," the researchers create a market for their own solution: hardware that monitors and alerts the user when they are "under-engaged". The AttentivU system can provide haptic or audio feedback when attention drops, essentially acting as the "scaffold" for the very cognitive deficits the paper warns against. The research is part of the "Fluid Interfaces" group at MIT, which frequently develops Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) systems like "Brain Switch" and "AVP-EEG". This context supports the hosts' suspicion that the paper’s "cognitive debt" theory may be designed to justify a need for these monitoring tools.

New comment by albumen in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"

albumen — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:39:08 +0000

The pics show renewable energy integrated with other activity (e.g. sheep grazing among solar panels); integrated into urban environments (on every rooftop and streets) and contrasted against ancient Chinese culture (e.g. temples). I think this makes the imagery substantially different from the alternative-offered US RE installations.